I have the great privilege of moderating a panel at >play Conference 2008 at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley on November 15th. The panel is called “Brands that Break Through” and it is about how large brands are using the social media and web 2.0 landscape to engage with their consumers. Panelists include execs from Universal McCann, Del Monte Foods, OMD, Ruder Finn, Gingerworks and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. In a nutshell, we’ve got some amazing heavy-hitters here.

Part of this gig is preparing questions for the guests that will stimulate a lively and informed discussion. I have some that I have been working on, but I’m curious to know if you have thoughts - what would YOU ask them if you had them all in a room? As part of the marketing team here at MediaTrust, I’m always looking for new ways to connect with brands and customers that may be interested in what we do. I know that many of you are in that same boat. So, let’s hear your thoughts!

On Saturday night, like millions of other people, I turned on TBS to watch the Red Sox/Rays game. I watched the pre-game coverage, then, all of a sudden they started playing Dick Clark’s Bloopers. Once that ended, they jumped in to an episode of the Steve Harvey Show. What the…? Could it be a rain delay? Tampa plays in a dome, so nope. Did something horrific happen at the stadium? Nope. I continued to watch TBS for the next 5 minutes waiting for some sort of update or screen crawl explaining what happened. Nothing. Finally, I pulled out my iPhone and went to search.twitter.com and entered “TBS” in the search field. Right away I saw the hundreds of messages of people trying to figure out what was going on. Within 3 minutes, I had links to boston.com and other websites that explained there was a router failure in Atlanta. Some Twitter users at the game started doing live play by play updates so that we would know what was happening on the field. Another user pointed me to a hidden gem on the MLB site called “four corners” where you can watch a live 4-camera mosaic of the game in a live video feed.

While I was getting all this useful information, I kept checking TBS.com, CNN.com and MSNBC.com to see if there were any updates. There weren’t. I kept watching TBS waiting for them to update their audience. Finally, at 5:19 PM PT - 25 minutes after they dumped out of the game coverage - there was a crawl apologizing for the the technical difficulties.

I looked to every major media outlet I could find to give me some answers to what was going on, and none did. Surely it was newsworthy that Game 6 of the ALCS was blacked out due to technical failure. Apparently not. In fact, it took nearly a half hour for TBS to give their audience any update. Through the use of Twitter, however, we had crowdsourced the problem and found multiple workarounds to get us the game information we all wanted. How many hundreds of millions of dollars do the major news outlets have tied up in broadcast equipment, staff and internet technology? Apparently, all the money in the world still can’t replace good ole’ fashioned human cooperation. THAT is the beauty, and true power, of social media.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I am no Twitter fanboy. I’ve been hard on them about their shortcomings and their infrastructure meltdowns. Over the last couple of months they’ve really gotten their act together. It’s a good thing too - otherwise how would all of us baseball fans have gotten the answers we needed during a time of TV crisis?

UPDATE: I received this from TBS Tuesday at 12:29 PM PT about the outage:

“On Saturday two circuit breakers in our Atlanta transmission operations tripped causing the master router and its backup - which are necessary to transmit any incoming feed outbound - to shut down.  This impacted our live feed for baseball from being distributed to any of the other networks in the Turner portfolio and caused the delay in our coverage.  Both our primary and backup routers were impacted by this problem.  We apologize to baseball fans for this mishap that caused a delay in our coverage.”

Meet up with the New York City Advaliant Affiliate Team on Friday, October 3rd from 5-7 PM at Rodeo Bar. You bring the good conversation and enthusiasm and we’ll buy the drinks and some appetizers. Not an Affiliate yet? Sign up now, then come chat with us over a cocktail.

Rodeo Bar is located at 375 Third Ave. @ 27th St. in Midtown.

RSVP@advaliant.com to insure a seat upstairs on the 2nd floor.

Over the past couple of years we have been bringing you insights and updates from a variety of events including New Media Expo, Affiliate Summit, ad:tech, and of course SXSW. We have spoke with many of the thought leaders in social media, brand design, advertising and technology. Well, it’s time that we step out from behind the camera and up onto that stage. Scott Parent, MediaTrust’s VP of Emerging Media, and our resident expert in social media and social influence marketing, will be presenting a discussion surrounding a look at the social media strategies for the enterprise. As you know by being a viewer here, social media has had a tremendous impact in C2C and B2C interactions, but many think the Holy Grail is the efficacy of social media in the B2B marketspace.

Scott will be joined by Christopher Smith on this panel, and they will share with you strategies for success including brand management, channel development, meaningful interactions and impact on revenue with social media for the enterprise.

You will need to vote for this panel here. You will also need to sign up to vote, but that is a pretty simple process, and one that would be greatly appreciated. Voting ends August 29th, so please vote early, and tell your friends to vote as well.

We’re here in Vegas at New Media Expo and having a great time. So far, we’ve interviewed Tim Bourquin, Founder of the Expo and Internet phenom Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Our photographer, Manuel Sanvictores, snapped this photo of our interview.

If you’re in Vegas, please reach out to either @groovemonkey or @americancliche to say hi.

There’s quite an uproar today over people discovering that many of their followers have disappeared. In some cases it is hundreds of people. Twitter is claiming that it because they deleted spammers. That may be true, but I know for fact that on my accounts many of the legitimate people that were following me are gone. For example, we just started a Twitter feed for Relevantly Speaking a week ago. Our numbers were still small, but you can see what’s happened overnight:

This may be the last nail in the coffin for Twitter. You work so hard to build up a community, then literally overnight, Twitter breaks something and erases it. For some people Twitter is a fun service they use to kill time or keep in touch with family. But for some of us this is a business tool. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours working with various people and companies helping them to build a meaningful and relevant community. Now, poof! It’s gone overnight.

I am holding out hope that Twitter will fix this and recover whatever data they say they didn’t lose, but I am skeptical. They can’t get their capacity issues worked out after all these months, what makes us think they can recover lost data?

At MediaTrust I am the “social media guy.” There are still factions of my company that don’t get what it is I do exactly. Social media is not an exact science and trying to explain it to someone that doesn’t understand services like Facebook or Twitter is going to have a hard time wrapping their mind around the value of things like podcasts and blogs. This applies to pretty much every company doing business today. For the past few years, I have been banging the drum on the importance of having a corporate blog strategy to everyone I meet. Yesterday Idris Mootee wrote a post that pretty much EXACTLY sums up what I have been trying to impress on people. He lists four key points that are key to your success:

1. You need credibility

2. You need to have a distinct perspective

3. Timeliness of relevant content

4. Balancing the corporate legal and strategic risks of posting vs. not posting

Check out his blog for more detail on each, but these are the bullet points. A successful blog has to have genuine intent. It has to be real, and it has to offer something other than the “me too” bandwagon-jumping I see too many companies fall prey to.

One final nugget of information I’d offer is don’t expect to make money off your corporate blog directly. I know, your business has enough cost centers, it doesn’t need another one, right? Wrong! If you follow the tips above and you put real effort forth, the amount of positive traction you will gain for your brand will be well worth it. Customers want to feel a connection to the companies they do business with. Offering a genuine perspective and a mechanism for your customers to provide feedback will be worth it’s weight in gold.

I reference Robert Scoble a lot on this blog. After all, he is a pioneer in this space and if you want to know which way the wind is blowing in social media, you BETTER know what he’s up to. That being said, I’ve been following his new gig over at Fast Company pretty closely. Obviously Fast Company is a well-respected brand in traditional business circles, but their foray into social media is fairly new. Bringing Scoble into the mix was a move that has been watched by a lot of people.

Scoble produces several shows for them. The one I’m focusing on for the purpose of this article is Workfast TV with his co-host Shel Israel. The premise of the show is a familiar format - Robert and Shel start off with some back and forth banter about what they did this past week, then they introduce their guest and proceed to have a discussion for the next 30 minutes or so.

It’s a trainwreck. First off, the vibe of the show is totally off. You have Scoble as the only one dressed in a suit and tie, while the rest are dressed more casually. Additionally his laptop is covered in tech stickers which totally negates any business look he’s trying to create. Second, the banter between Israel and Scoble is painfully hard to watch. Instead of being friends, you’d swear they met 5 minutes before the show. Attempts at jokes fall flat and are awkwardly laughed off. As a viewer it is uncomfortable to watch. Finally, the format is flawed. They sit around a table with the guest. While they’re bantering back and forth, the guest is sitting there uncomfortably wondering what to do with themselves. By the time they start referring to the guest in the third person, you start to cringe.

On a positive note, the production values are top-notch.

Ok, I know this was a very long-winded way to get to my point, but it was necessary for context. I posted a condensed and gentler version of the above critique in the comments of Workfast TV a couple of days ago. Guess what? The comment was deleted. Then, I started to see the bulk of the other users in the thread complaining that their comments had been deleted for being critical. Fast Company then chimed in… (Wait, I see they have now deleted their initial comments defending the deletion of user comments). So not only are they deleting unfavorable comments from users, they have seen fit to pull their initial defense of doing so. Wow.

That last piece just really cements my argument. Fast Company doesn’t get what social media is about. They thought that hiring Scoble would bring them instant audience and credibility - and it did. But now that is eroding quickly. After all, one of Scoble’s key mantras is that companies should be engaged with their consumers on the web. Fast Company has essentially thrown that way of thinking out the window.

I realize that Scoble and Israel have little or no say in Fast Company’s practices. I also understand that business is business, and they have to put food on the table. However, how do you build your career as a transparent blogger, then sit back and watch your personal brand be tarnished by a company using tactics that are the antithesis of your view of social media ? I reached out to Scoble on Twitter and Israel on his blog, and as of this posting there was no response from either of them. Are their hands tied? Does their silence mean they condone it?

I applaud companies for taking the leap and putting some money into the social web. The benefits can be tremendous for your traffic and your brand. But, you have to be willing to have a genuine conversation. You can’t put out a show about how companies are effectively using the web 2.0 world to their benefit, then turn around and censor unflattering feedback. Now, before Fast Company removed their corporate comment yesterday, they stated that they only removed negative attacks and said they were open to critiques of the show. That’s complete BS because my comment was deleted and it was a genuine piece of constructive feedback. Where is the two-way dialog in that example? Amazingly, Fast Company is actually going to be worse off in the web 2.0 space than they were before they started their social media initiatives. Instead of this being a brand-building effort, it’s now turning into brand repair.

What should you take away from Fast Company’s mistake?

1. Don’t jump into emerging media unless you really want to engage your customers in an open dialog.

2. Welcome and encourage genuine feedback in your forums and blogs. Don’t delete something because it doesn’t fit with your tightly-controlled marketing message.

3. Listen to feedback. Most of it is genuine, and although it may be painful to read, you may be able to learn from it and make something in your organization better.

4. Reward feedback, whether it’s negative or positive, by engaging participators with a response.

Scoble and Israel know these things. I bet they tell this stuff to companies everyday when they interview them. So is it not bizarre that they would work for a company that so clearly seems to hold an opposing view?

Like many people, I’ve become frustrated with Twitter’s downtime. The fact that “Fail Whale” has become part of the social media vernacular is proof-positive and certainly not the type of brand awareness that Twitter wants. Despite it’s unreliability, Twitter has become part of our daily life. What else is there?

You can’t swing a dead cat in the blogosphere these days without hitting a post touting the benefits of Friendfeed. Scoble’s been using it for months. Now Calacanis is pushing it almost as much as Mahalo. I decided to see what the fuss was about.

First, the interface is much cleaner than Twitter. The more people you follow on Twitter, the harder it becomes to actually make sense of the information coming through. The noise to signal ratio goes way up. Unless you use a service like Summize, you easily miss content aimed at you. Friendfeed has threaded conversations. The ability to reply and comment in an orderly, easy-to-read way is huge.

Next, the process of following people on Twitter is tedious and time-consuming. Friendfeed integrates with your facebook account so the people you are friends with on facebook automatically become part of your Friendfeed network. Friendfeed also integrates your blog, YouTube, SumbleUpon, and yes, even your Twitter account.

The final feather in Friendfeed’s cap is it’s reliability. By many estimates they have half the users and traffic that Twitter has, and so far, haven’t had any of the scalability problems that have plagued Twitter since their inception. I’m not an IT guy and have no idea what it takes to keep a site like Twitter stable. BUT, I do know that they are sitting on a goldmine. The only thing killing them is their crappy infrastructure. Why on earth wouldn’t you make this your top priority and hire the right tech team to fix this issue once and for all? I know these things don’t happen overnight, but in 3 or 4 months it’s only gotten worse, not better. What’s the deal?

I haven’t quite rang the death knell for Twitter yet. They were the pioneer in the micro-blogging movement and they have a great brand. That will keep their head above water for a short time, but if they don’t resolve their tech issues soon Friendfeed is going to continue to poach their user base. Then, it will be too late and whale will have permanently failed.

Robert Scoble is talking about how YouTube is going long-form and why it will be more profitable for them and more attractive to advertisers. His argument is that if someone is willing to sit through a 30-minute video online, then they are more engaged and will more likely be customers for advertisers:

Someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

Here’s why: long videos are a filter. Only the most passionate and most interested people online will watch such a video. Those who aren’t interested wouldn’t even consider watching a long video.

It’s a nice theory, but I don’t buy it. First, I believe that a large chunk of people that consume online video do so at work. That environment allows you to watch a 2-5 minute video and then get back to what you are doing. It also allows for more interruptions, while still being able to finish the video. How many times are you going to tolerate being interrupted at work by co-workers, phone calls, or email before you throw in the towel on a 30-minute video?

People just don’t watch long-form video on their computer. My own video work has fallen victim to this as well. I’ve done many videos that were 15 minutes long and after watching them with colleagues or with an objective eye, it was clear that people get antsy after 7 or 8 minutes. It made me cut deeper during the editing process and really get to the meat of the content. My productions are better for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it is impossible for a long-form video to find an audience online. After all, Scoble does just fine with viewership of his pieces - although it doesn’t hurt to have his brand name and the weight of Fast Company behind him. Additionally, sites like Hulu that archive complete TV shows and movies will find an audience because they are serving up content that already has a traditional media audience of millions. It’s hard enough for unknown prosumer / UGC / pro content to find an audience with short, well-paced pieces. I believe that becomes an even bigger challenge when the content starts getting into the 30-minute range.

The other side effect I see of YouTube allowing video longer than 10 minutes is increased piracy. They can barely police their network efficiently now with a 10-minute limit. This opens up their network to people adding complete TV shows or movies. That means their copyright department is going to be working lots of overtime.

Advertisers want engagement. We know that. To me, that is better measured by how many people comment on a video or link to it, rather than making the assumption that committing to watching a longer video makes them a better potential customer.